This is one of those moments when a broad swath of citizens hunger for coherence and direction.
It comes with a stab of pain to acknowledge that National Review was not the most influential journal of the previous century. Under the charismatic leadership of William F. Buckley Jr., NR became a force in the country and, consequently, in the world for almost half of that bloody century. NR reshaped America’s domestic politics, gave clarion voice to our new role in global affairs and, at least around the edges, helped to refurbish the inherited culture. The accomplishments of Buckley’s “little magazine” were prodigious, and you will hear more about them next year as National Review Institute rolls out its commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Buckley’s birth.
So what’s the rub? Why did NR never take its place in the family of little magazines as primus inter pares? I think it may have been the result of dreaming too small or, as Buckley might have put it, a case of that most conservative of virtues — epistemological modesty. It was right there in the name of the magazine itself. Unlike the Nation, NR never assumed full continental responsibility. Unlike the New Republic, NR never proclaimed transformational aspiration. Unlike Ramparts, NR never hoped that push would come to shove. No, the name National Review suggested a considered reflection, a posture more observational than activist. There was no hint of revolutionary urgency.
In that respect, among many others, National Review was no Iskra. Founded in 1900, Iskra was the creation of Vladimir Ulyanov and Georgi Plekhanov and was named explicitly to evoke memories of the Decembrists, who a century earlier had sought to strike “a spark that will become a flame of liberty.” Iskra, “the Spark.”
Ulyanov was a young fireball eager for the fray. Plekhanov was older, and slowed by the weight of lived experience. (You may be tempted to think of them as Bill Buckley and Willi Schlamm.) Soon enough, and inevitably, wisdom proved to be no match for energy.
Ulyanov set up in working-class Munich (with Plekhanov in lakeside Geneva) and began the work of building out what he called a “central organ,” a publication designed to develop and then enforce ideological doctrine on his emerging movement. Iskra, he wrote, was to be “an enormous pair of bellows that would blow every spark of class struggle and popular indignation into a general conflagration.”
He worked out of a high-stress editorial office with his printing press in the basement. The idea was that when the Okhrana, the secret police, came calling, staffers would detain them upstairs just long enough for Ulyanov, downstairs, to trigger a jerry-rigged, self-destruct device. By the time the agents descended to the basement, the printing press and every trace of its previous existence would have vanished. That was the idea, anyway.
Ulyanov played many roles. He hashed out dialectical wrangles between party hotheads, assigned articles to a few trusted allies, wrote and rewrote articles under numerous bylines, printed the newspaper in his basement shop, and then smuggled copies through various border crossings and port controls back into the motherland. (An edition was considered a rare success if most of the subscribers actually received their copies.)
In his younger days, Ulyanov had been sent to Siberia for anti-regime thought crimes, and he was determined to avoid another such educational experience. To throw the Okhrana off his tracks, he changed identities frequently, forged new papers, crashed in borrowed apartments. Historians estimate that during his days on the run he adopted more than 100 different pseudonyms. Perhaps for reasons no more complicated than paperwork fatigue, he settled finally on the name Lenin. He would now be known to his comrades, and soon to the Okhrana and ultimately to history, as Vladimir Ilyich (a patronymic) Lenin.
Lenin was still in Munich when the revolution began in Russia. (It was an editor’s mortification: He read the news in somebody else’s publication.) Lenin pivoted in a single day. With the tsar on the way down and quite possibly out — by 1914, Nicholas II was broadly unpopular with the Russian people and opposed directly by several powerful factions within the intelligentsia and the army and across factory floors — Lenin redirected his movement to ensure that his own faction, the Bolsheviks, would emerge supreme from the “general conflagration.” He famously raced to the Finland Station, then in a semi-autonomous region of the Russian Empire, and on to St. Petersburg where he assumed operational command of the Bolshevik uprising.
Bolshevik victory was by no means assured. Even within his own communist ranks, Lenin’s Bolsheviks, so called because he simply proclaimed them to be the majority faction, were clearly outnumbered by bitter rivals forced to settle for a name denoting minority status, the Mensheviks. He put down the intra-party dissenters harshly and then, one after another, crushed the prospects of the other anti-tsarist factions. By 1918, Lenin had brought down the House of Romanov, which had ruled Russia for more than 300 years. Lenin was that rare combination of strategic genius and detail man. He personally ordered the execution of Nicholas and all members of his immediate family.
Now, there was an editor.
I file here the obligatory affidavit with the thought police: I am not expressing admiration or approval or even tolerance of Lenin’s philosophy, tactics, or habits of violence. I merely note that he knew an opportunity when he saw one.
Luce and Elliott. Bradlee and Rosenthal. Buckley and Navasky. All of the century’s great editors succeeded, at least in modest measure, in moving the world from where they had found it to where they thought it should be. They understood that the wheel of history spins unpredictably and, most of the time, fails even to pause for the consideration of theory or the possibility of strategic alternative. But there come those moments — moments of ideological exhaustion, of national self-doubt, of tectonic political and geopolitical shift — when a broad swath of citizens hunger for coherence and direction. They need a way to organize the confusing fragments of their own lives into patterns of confident understanding.
This is one of those moments.